From Varkala we take our first Indian train to Kochi.
We have been ‘educated’ in the booking intricacies for trains by a lovely tour operator in Varkala. A British woman who is married to the owner helps us with our tickets and advises us on the best seats to buy. Booking tickets never seems to be less than a 2 hour endeavour. First you check the train times etc. If there isn’t a direct train then you need to know exactly where the connections occur as you can only look at direct connections. Then you check seat availability for each class. In fairness it is a good system in that you can see if there are seats available in the class you want. But as there are different specifications for seat allocations you can miss seat availability if you don’t know which ones to choose from.
For example, you can check the general allocation; if you have no luck there you can then check tourist availability; if you are a woman you have your own class of booking as well. If you have a ‘disability’ you also have special allocations. Such disabilities include diabetics, transplantees, amputees, and on through a list of around 50 different conditions. So, choose your available ticket and go on to book it. Then comes the passport numbers, names, gender and ages of the passengers. (This does also have the added advantage (?) that when you board the train you can check the allocation list and see the names, ages and genders of your travelling companions!) With Brett and I, we could only book the tickets as long as the entire booking was in his name! So, the first time we did it we had to go back to the beginning as it wouldn’t let us book it under my name first. If I had been travelling alone it would have been OK.
At any given moment the system might crash or the electricity might cut out and off you go to start again. Similarly, we couldn’t pay for it ourselves as we couldn’t get it to accept any of our credit cards! So ... off we go and start again with an agent. Yes, we are having so much fun!!!
Intercity 2nd class compartments have 4 bunks with 2 up and 2 down and, even if you are travelling during the day and unlikely to want to go to sleep, you are not allocated a seat but a bunk. If you are unfortunate enough to be in a compartment where they do want to sleep then you could be stuck on a bunk with the curtains drawn and lights off during the day!! It seemed a bit strange at first that so many Indian travellers did exactly that – but after a couple of trips we realise that if you don’t want to look at the sights then train travel is excruciatingly slow, where you are lucky if you average 50 kms (yes, that is kms and not miles!?!) per hour, and sleeping isn’t such a bad idea. Thus, because you might be confined to your bunk it is really useful to book a lower one so you can just sit if you want to. If you are really clever then you book the two side bunks as this means that you won’t have to share with anyone else and can sit or sleep when you want to. Etiquette demands that bunks are made and the lights are off after 9pm on overnight journeys. We both felt like errant teenagers as we sat up after 10pm. In fairness the fact that we had smuggled on a few beers for the journey might have contributed to the feeling – but we felt that a 10 hour overnight journey with no alcohol at all was asking the impossible.
Interestingly there is another type of ticket that is along the lines of ‘booked pending cancellation’ which means you can board the train and only have an allocated seat so long as someone cancels their booking or misses the train. At one time we had a family of four in our compartment who had booked a 48 hour journey and only had 1 ½ allocated seats (not sure how the ½ came about, probably for the child) for it. They were quite resigned to sharing one bunk if necessary. After 10 hours we were more than ready to leave the train and couldn’t imagine doing another 38 hours. 1st class travel seems to be used mainly by tourists with businessmen (and I never did see a businesswoman on a train), middle classes and tourists then using 2nd and 3rd class air con compartments depending on availability.
There is the very ‘quaint’ service of providing sheets, blankets, a pillow and a flannel/facecloth for each bunk. There is a carriage attendant who passes these out and – we noticed with one particularly obnoxious young Indian man – will even make up your bed if you request it. Once you have resigned yourself to the vagaries of Indian laundry standards and managed the travel back through time to horsehair camping blankets then you can lull gently to sleep at any given hour of the day.
Further down the train you find the carriages which the majority of locals use. Here they have 6 bunks stacked 3 on each side with an average of 24 people in each compartment, with no windows just bars. In times past it probably would have aptly been called ‘steerage’. There is no allocation for these carriages and the scrum for the seats is amazing. In Kochi, we see how some enterprising souls jump onto the empty train as it pulls into the station so that they can run through the carriages to get a seat before the train has even stopped. Otherwise its is a melee of adults, children and phenomenal amounts of baggage being forced onto the train . At one point the baggage car door is opened and I can see that it is jammed full of people – but some earnest negotiation means that another family of 5 is squeezed in.
Because a seat in these conditions is a better option than no seat – particularly when journeys on the intercity trains are seldom less than 10 hours long and more often run into days - it is understandable that people use the only option available to them. However, my ire constantly rises at the appalling mis-administration of the basic infrastructure needed for the majority of the population; particularly when we are constantly told how 'rich' the Indian economy is at the moment. So yes, Indian trains are incredibly cheap and run mainly on time and it must be a logistical nightmare to keep so many billions of people on the move each day but they are slow, smelly, dirty, and hugely over-crowded unless you have the luxury of travelling in the air-conditioned carriages.
We have been ‘educated’ in the booking intricacies for trains by a lovely tour operator in Varkala. A British woman who is married to the owner helps us with our tickets and advises us on the best seats to buy. Booking tickets never seems to be less than a 2 hour endeavour. First you check the train times etc. If there isn’t a direct train then you need to know exactly where the connections occur as you can only look at direct connections. Then you check seat availability for each class. In fairness it is a good system in that you can see if there are seats available in the class you want. But as there are different specifications for seat allocations you can miss seat availability if you don’t know which ones to choose from.
For example, you can check the general allocation; if you have no luck there you can then check tourist availability; if you are a woman you have your own class of booking as well. If you have a ‘disability’ you also have special allocations. Such disabilities include diabetics, transplantees, amputees, and on through a list of around 50 different conditions. So, choose your available ticket and go on to book it. Then comes the passport numbers, names, gender and ages of the passengers. (This does also have the added advantage (?) that when you board the train you can check the allocation list and see the names, ages and genders of your travelling companions!) With Brett and I, we could only book the tickets as long as the entire booking was in his name! So, the first time we did it we had to go back to the beginning as it wouldn’t let us book it under my name first. If I had been travelling alone it would have been OK.
At any given moment the system might crash or the electricity might cut out and off you go to start again. Similarly, we couldn’t pay for it ourselves as we couldn’t get it to accept any of our credit cards! So ... off we go and start again with an agent. Yes, we are having so much fun!!!
Intercity 2nd class compartments have 4 bunks with 2 up and 2 down and, even if you are travelling during the day and unlikely to want to go to sleep, you are not allocated a seat but a bunk. If you are unfortunate enough to be in a compartment where they do want to sleep then you could be stuck on a bunk with the curtains drawn and lights off during the day!! It seemed a bit strange at first that so many Indian travellers did exactly that – but after a couple of trips we realise that if you don’t want to look at the sights then train travel is excruciatingly slow, where you are lucky if you average 50 kms (yes, that is kms and not miles!?!) per hour, and sleeping isn’t such a bad idea. Thus, because you might be confined to your bunk it is really useful to book a lower one so you can just sit if you want to. If you are really clever then you book the two side bunks as this means that you won’t have to share with anyone else and can sit or sleep when you want to. Etiquette demands that bunks are made and the lights are off after 9pm on overnight journeys. We both felt like errant teenagers as we sat up after 10pm. In fairness the fact that we had smuggled on a few beers for the journey might have contributed to the feeling – but we felt that a 10 hour overnight journey with no alcohol at all was asking the impossible.
Interestingly there is another type of ticket that is along the lines of ‘booked pending cancellation’ which means you can board the train and only have an allocated seat so long as someone cancels their booking or misses the train. At one time we had a family of four in our compartment who had booked a 48 hour journey and only had 1 ½ allocated seats (not sure how the ½ came about, probably for the child) for it. They were quite resigned to sharing one bunk if necessary. After 10 hours we were more than ready to leave the train and couldn’t imagine doing another 38 hours. 1st class travel seems to be used mainly by tourists with businessmen (and I never did see a businesswoman on a train), middle classes and tourists then using 2nd and 3rd class air con compartments depending on availability.
There is the very ‘quaint’ service of providing sheets, blankets, a pillow and a flannel/facecloth for each bunk. There is a carriage attendant who passes these out and – we noticed with one particularly obnoxious young Indian man – will even make up your bed if you request it. Once you have resigned yourself to the vagaries of Indian laundry standards and managed the travel back through time to horsehair camping blankets then you can lull gently to sleep at any given hour of the day.
Further down the train you find the carriages which the majority of locals use. Here they have 6 bunks stacked 3 on each side with an average of 24 people in each compartment, with no windows just bars. In times past it probably would have aptly been called ‘steerage’. There is no allocation for these carriages and the scrum for the seats is amazing. In Kochi, we see how some enterprising souls jump onto the empty train as it pulls into the station so that they can run through the carriages to get a seat before the train has even stopped. Otherwise its is a melee of adults, children and phenomenal amounts of baggage being forced onto the train . At one point the baggage car door is opened and I can see that it is jammed full of people – but some earnest negotiation means that another family of 5 is squeezed in.
Because a seat in these conditions is a better option than no seat – particularly when journeys on the intercity trains are seldom less than 10 hours long and more often run into days - it is understandable that people use the only option available to them. However, my ire constantly rises at the appalling mis-administration of the basic infrastructure needed for the majority of the population; particularly when we are constantly told how 'rich' the Indian economy is at the moment. So yes, Indian trains are incredibly cheap and run mainly on time and it must be a logistical nightmare to keep so many billions of people on the move each day but they are slow, smelly, dirty, and hugely over-crowded unless you have the luxury of travelling in the air-conditioned carriages.
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